


Beastly Ascension

by doctorate_in_realology



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Action, Blood and Gore, Gen, Gunplay, Original Character(s), Swordfighting, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 06:16:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10870833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorate_in_realology/pseuds/doctorate_in_realology
Summary: The skilled Hunter Gabriel fights tooth and nail through the bloody conflicts of Yharnam amidst the night of The Hunt, facing adversity at every turn, be it in the form of beast or man.





	Beastly Ascension

**Author's Note:**

> *blows dust off AO3 account* Haven't cracked this thing open in a while
> 
> Hey so this work is called "I'm Procrastinating Oxton Airborne Because I'm an Asshole and Don't Know How to Touch It with a Ten-Foot Pole and Have Started Playing Bloodborne Again." I'm still workshopping the title cut me some slack
> 
> I'm thinking of turning this into its own thing as well! I have some ideas I think would be neat to explore. For now, enjoy a one-off while I go back to fucking about.

Footsteps. Falling upon wet cobblestone, one after the other with wide strides and laboured gaits.

How many were there? Three? Four? Gabriel heightened his senses and pricked up his hearing to discern their numbers.

Four, definitely. One near the curb on the other side of the street, some metres away. Another, shuffling a few feet in front of his party and dragging a weapon behind him. An axe, judging by the weight of its head glancing off the stones, the nuances in its sound.

Orange light bled across the road before the search party. Another had a torch and a flintlock pistol, the other armed with a pitchfork, which Gabriel had discovered upon their passing him, ignorant of his presence.

Their ignorance would be short-lived.

He darted out from his concealment behind a wagon left in a narrow alleyway and yanked the blade from his belt. With an ear-piercing whine, it sliced through the air, and the fur-ridden flesh of his target—the beast-man wielding the torch and pistol—with just as much ease.

Blood burst forth from the gash in his chest, and he tossed the torch air into the air as he lurched back with a cry, his guiding flame spewing embers as it arced in glowing circles. His cohorts recovered from their surprise, but not quickly enough.

Gabriel rolled beneath the swath of the pitchfork and slashed the knee of the point-man, digging the blade into the base of his skull as he fell. He wrenched it from the bone and spun on his knee, turning to face his foes and pulling the firearm from his hip in the same swift movement. Twice the barrel flashed and cracked, and the two remaining men fell.

The torch hit the ground.

Gabriel stood to his feet and wiped the blood from the flat of his curved blade on his black sleeve, and again on the short cloak draped over his shoulders, as he scanned his surroundings. Dusk’s foreboding orange hues dimly lit the Yharnam streets, its spired rooftops silhouetted against the sky, and crimson rivulets surged through the channels in between the cobblestones.

Luckily, no more afflicted Yharnamites were near enough to distract Gabriel from such observations. He could remain undetected, provided he not dally.

He tucked his lip beneath his teeth and let out a curt whistle. Upon the sounding of the signal, another Hunter with a sheepish man in tattered expensive clothes in tow emerged from hiding.

“Couldn’t have done it quieter?” asked the newly-revealed Hunter, irritation weighing on his tone. His eyes narrowed in the small gap between his mask and frayed tricorn hat.

Gabriel didn’t respond. “Let’s keep moving. Beasts will have heard the shots.” He turned his gaze to the frail man in their company, recognizing the malcontent in his expression. “You’ve gone white as a sheet, Mister Dowell.”

He raised a finger, quaking and shivering, to the corpses at Gabriel’s feet. “I-I knew those men… They were my neighbours. Good, decent fellows, one and all! And look what they’ve been reduced to!”

“I’m sorry, Mister Dowell. It’s unfair that these things should happen to good people.”

“It’s the way things work around here,” said Gabriel’s cohort. “Yharnam has been in a state like this for a long, long time.”

Mister Dowell turned to him with a look of utter revulsion. “That does not make it any easier!”

“I never said it did,” came the response through gritted teeth. “All I’m saying is that you need to understand that this is the natural order of things around here.”

“ _Tiegan_ ,” Gabriel barked.

“What?”

“If you don’t have anything endearing to say, _shut up._ ”

Tiegan said nothing. Just as well, as Gabriel could practically hear his brow furrowing anyway.

They forged on, wary of every step and street corner. They were still several blocks from their destination—a church in the Cathedral Ward being used as a safe haven for survivors of the night—and needed to maintain their current pace to have any hope of making it in relative safety.

Tiegan rounded a corner and swiftly dove behind the corner of a building across the street. He motioned for Gabriel and Mister Dowell to move up, meaning the road ahead was thankfully clear.

The two approached the building corner adjacent from Tiegan, and Gabriel barred Dowell from moving forward before he could scan the fore. Confirming it was clear, he gestured his head down the street, and they moved accordingly.

“How much further?” Tiegan whispered.

“A few more blocks and we’ll be in the Cathedral Ward. Once we’re there, we can cut across the market plaza and—”

Gabriel’s directions were cut short by shattering class. He turned in a flash to find that a lycanthrope had bounded out of the building Tiegan had taken cover behind and tackled him to the sidewalk. It roared in his face, spittle pockmarking his mask and eyelids, and tried to seize his neck with its fangs.

With a shout, Tiegan punched the barrel of his blunderbuss into the beast’s gut and fired a trio of point-blank blasts. It flinched heavily from the impacts, but still hung over him with fury made palpable by the pain it withstood.

Gabriel cursed under his breath and rushed the beast. He crouched low and drove his blade upwards into its chin. With its jaw pinned to the rest of its head, it twitched and writhed, clawing at the stone as the last vestiges of its life fled it, before finally becoming limp.

Gabriel wrenched his weapon from the lycanthrope’s mouth and let it fall to the ground. He extended his hand out to Tiegan, only to have it smacked away in frustration after a moment’s pause.

“I had it,” Tiegan seethed as he stood.

“You’re welcome,” Gabriel growled.

He was about to motion for Mister Dowell—who’d been quivering at the street corner—when he heard a faint sound. Sheepish, and somber.

A whimper. Sobbing, coming from inside the house from which the lycanthrope had leapt.

“Mister Dowell, stay with Tiegan,” he said, taking cautious steps towards the shattered window.

“What are you doing?” Tiegan asked. “If we weren’t loud enough before, we were just now.”

Gabriel ignored him for the umpteenth time and hoisted himself up into the window. His feet hit the wood floor with trained silence despite the fragments of glass that should have been obnoxiously crunching beneath his boots. He advanced, ever-aware and at the ready should another threat lurk.

He made note of the mutilated body lying on the table to his left, in the living room of the house. The man had not been laid there, but thrown, no doubt by the beast that had just attacked them. The blood was fresh, and its myriad violent strokes along the walls glistened in the dim light.

He closed in on the source of the cries. They sounded from inside an understairs storage closet at the back of the home. A floorboard creaked under Gabriel’s weight, and he made out a short gasp of surprise before the sobs were forcibly halted.

He laid his blade and pistol against the floor to indicate to whoever was inside that he meant no harm, and cautiously opened the closet door.

The moment it cracked open, he was greeted by a scream, and a boot collided with his cheek. The projectile knocked him off-balance and onto his behind, and from the alcove fled a fearful young girl.

He rubbed his cheek with a grunt and pulled himself to his feet. The girl had hauled off upstairs. Gabriel approached the base of the staircase and called out to her.

“I don’t mean you any harm, young lady,” he said. “I’m no beast.”

The whimpers of fear waned only slightly, and she poked her head out from beyond the door at the top of the stairs. Her fingers curled around the frame.

“I’m a Hunter,” Gabriel went on. “I’m gathering folk to take to a safe place in the Cathedral Ward. Would you like to come with us?”

Intrigued, the girl slowly crept out from beyond the door and padded tentatively down the steps. Gabriel backed away from the bottom, giving her a comfortable distance.

She reached the bottom, and he finally had a good look at her. Her long, straw-like hair was knotted, unkempt and matted; tears had forged shimmering trails on her cheeks; the dress she wore was surely beautiful, before having been torn and tattered, and stained with blood that was more than likely not her own—if this was ­her home and not just a hiding place, then the dress was presumably the most expensive thing the family owned. She couldn’t have been older than eight.

“My name is Gabriel,” he said softly, with a smile. “May I ask your name?”

She rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand, and clasped her hands in front of her as she bowed her head away from the Hunter. “A-Abigail.”

“‘Abigail,’” Gabriel remarked. “A name as beautiful as the young lady who bears it.”

He earned a small smile from her for that, and a bigger, more earnest one when he took his hat from his head and swept its wide brim in such a dramatic arc that it dusted the floor when he bowed. “It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Abigail. May I escort you somewhere safer?”

She nodded, the smile gone again, and took his hand cautiously when he held it out to her.

“Where are your parents?”

Tears welled quickly in her eyes once more, and her lovely little face contorted into abject misery. She pointed to the man on the table, and sobbed.

“Don’t look,” he said as he crouched between her and her deceased father and took her by her shoulders. “What about your mother?”

“M-My mum turned,” she choked, “into that big wolf.”

Gabriel shook his head. The poor thing…

“I’m sorry, young lady. Let’s get you somewhere safe, away from this place.”

He retrieved his weapons from the floor and opened the door out onto the street. Tiegan and Mister Dowell turned to him and Abigail and unison, and Tiegan rolled his eyes well into his brow with a sigh.

“This is Abigail,” Gabriel said. “She’ll be coming with us as well. Abigail, that man there is Tiegan, another Hunter, and that there is Mister Dowell, a man in our care.”

“What are you _doing?”_ Tiegan hissed. “Dowell is slowing us down enough as it is, now you want to take her too?”

“She’s a _child,”_ Gabriel spat back.

“You mean to leave her? A young girl alone on the streets of Yharnam?!” Dowell cried. “How can you say that, Sir Tiegan?!”

Distant roars interrupted them. Harmful men, a whole mob of them, were none too far behind.

“ _That_ is how,” Tiegan replied. “All she’s going to do is slow us down, and then we’ll _all_ be dead.”

Gabriel nearly launched down the stairs, and got close enough to Tiegan that he could feel his breath on his face.

“How about you double back and hold off that mob then, hm? That ought to buy us plenty of time. That’s about all the use you’d be to us anyway.”

Tiegan responded solely with a glare.

“She is coming with us. Object, and you’ll buy us all the time we need whether you like it or not. Now _move._ ”

Another scoff, before Tiegan conceded and begun down the road ahead of them, shaking his head as he went.

“Has he always been like this?” Mister Dowell asked in hushed tones as he approached.

“Most likely. Luckily, I haven’t had the displeasure of knowing him long enough to say for certain. Come, we need to get a move on if we want to stay ahead of that mob.”

Gabriel felt something tugging at his cuff. He looked down to find Abigail staring up at him with beautiful green eyes he hadn’t noticed before.

“Will you carry me, Mister Hunter?”

Gabriel chuckled, and knelt down to her height with his back turned to her. “Certainly. All aboard, young lady.”

He hoisted her onto his back and stood with a slight grunt of exertion. He started after Tiegan, with Mister Dowell keeping pace.

“And please, Abigail, call me Gabriel,” he said.

They wound through the labyrinthian Yharnam streets with Tiegan at the fore, scanning every street and alley for any threats. The Cathedral Ward was no further than a block, and from then on it would be smooth sailing.

They crossed a bridge leading to a staircase on their right-hand side, with a metal fence standing tall at the top of the wall before them. Those stairs would take them right to where their destination lie.

An ogre of a man, however, descended the staircase at the same time, and stood between them and their goal. He rolled his jaw from side-to-side, making inane moans and grunts that would have meant something to the effect of a threat of violence had the prospect of intelligible speech not been wrested from his mind by the Plague.

Gabriel let Abigail off his back and grasped his weapons. Tiegan similarly readied himself.

A shrill howl echoed in the distance behind them, however. It was fortunate that Gabriel and Tiegan were Hunters worth their salt, because they knew immediately that its source was a much truer threat to them than the ogre-man.

“We need to move,” Tiegan urged. “Now. Let’s get this brute out of our way, Gabriel.”

“Abigail, Mister Dowell—stay back. Be ready to move.”

Abigail moved behind Mister Dowell as they backed away, both glancing feverishly behind them for whatever beast had made that horrifying scream.

Gabriel and Tiegan hunched, ready to launch at the ogre. It met their measure much the same, and coiled its arm back, ready to strike with the cinderblock in its hand.

But Gabriel tore his attention away when he heard the shrieking horror hurtling through the air. He looked up, and saw its malformed body outlined by dusk’s orange light. Curled, grotesque horns sprouted from its head, and its left arm was disproportionately larger than its right, and rife with fur and bloodstains.

“ _Cleric Beast!”_ he shouted.

Tiegan cursed and rushed the ogre. If they had any hope of escaping the Cleric Beast, they would need the path to be clear.

The Cleric Beast’s clawed feet smashed into the cobblestone, the impact sending chunks of dirt and rock bursting out from beneath it. It roared vehemently at its prey lining the bridge, its breath heavy with the stench of pestilence and death.

“Behind me!” Gabriel called out to Dowell and Abigail. They heeded without hesitation, running from the new, much larger threat.

Its dominant arm raised into the sky and came crashing down. Gabriel leapt back, the beast’s fist slamming into the ground where he had stood not a moment before. He fired twice at its head, which served only to infuriate it further.

“Tiegan?!” Gabriel shouted, inquiring the state of the ogre.

“A little busy at the moment!” came his reply.

The Cleric Beast swung its weaker arm in a knee-high swath, smashing the metal fences lining the sides of the bridge to pieces. Gabriel hopped deftly over it, rolling to the side of the follow-up and thrusting his blade into the forearm of the monster. It howled in anger, and hopped backwards to the end of the road against the façade of a building.

Gabriel heard a wet _pop_ , and turned to find Tiegan’s cleaver embedded in the ogre’s skull. He waved them forward.

“Move, move, go!” he shouted.

Dowell rocketed past as Gabriel scooped Abigail into his arms. The Cleric Beast soared through the air and poised to bring its monstrous fists down upon them.

Gabriel ran. Ran like the wind. Ran not just for his own life, but for Abigail’s.

He wasn’t fast enough.

The impact of the transformed Cleric’s fists, practically brushing Gabriel’s heels, sent him sailing over the edge of the bridge. Abigail shrieked as they soared, before thudding with the earth, her own fall cushioned by Gabriel’s.

The Cleric Beast leapt over the bridge and onto the sub-street below. It screeched again, deafening by virtue of its proximity.

“Gabriel!” Dowell shouted, appearing at the lip of the bridge with Tiegan at his side.

“Tiegan, get down here!” Gabriel cried.

Tiegan stood worryingly still, ignoring Gabriel’s cries for assistance.

“Tiegan, you need to hurry!” he urged, holding Abigail close to him as he stood.

He saw Tiegan grasp Dowell by his arm and tug him to the staircase. “What are you doing?!” Dowell resisted. “We have to help them!”

“They’re as good as dead!” he yelled. “We’ll be too if we don’t leave, _now!”_

Tiegan had to drag Dowell away, otherwise he wouldn’t have made any ground. He saw them bound up the staircase, and they escaped his vision. Gone. Vanished without a hint of remorse.

Tiegan abandoned them.

The Cleric Beast towered over Gabriel and Abigail. It screeched once more, and coiled back to give chase.

All that was left to do was run.


End file.
